


salt

by besselfcn



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Fluff but it's Angst, Godlings, Hallucinations, M/M, Passive Suicidality, Pining, Possibly Unrequited Love, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:22:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27804508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: A godling takes Jaskier and Geralt to the coast.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 14
Kudos: 84





	salt

When Jaskier wakes, the divot beside him in bed is empty but still warm. Outside he hears the impatient crooning of faraway birds; he tastes against his tongue both salt and sand carried in by the wind. 

He nudges slippers onto his feet and wraps around his shoulders a thick coat made of soft furs. It is unnecessarily luxurious; he melts into the clothing like butter.

Quietly, he follows the path of open doors--out of the bedroom, through the kitchen, out to the pier that stretches behind the seaside cottage and spills out over the ocean. At the end of it, a figure clad in black, a sword across his lap and the sharp ting of a whetstone ringing out. 

“Geralt,” Jaskier calls out, even though it isn’t. 

The puppeted mockery that he calls Geralt turns to see him and smiles. His eyes are that thin cats-eye yellow; his jawline is sharp and his canines are sharper. He looks every inch the White Wolf, and he isn’t. 

He’s a dreamthing. A fantasy. A conjuration keeping Jaskier sedated in a deep and restless sleep. 

“Jaskier,” Geralt says warmly, like the name means something to him.

Jaskier can afford to sleep a little longer. 

  
  


It started with the godling that followed him to Vizima.

At least, he knows now it was a godling. He remembered Geralt saying something of the sort, once; a description he pressed him for in order to make a song out of a contract. That they follow men to torment them with nightmarish fiction. That they are at once kind and cruel, joyfully devious.

“They’d like my work, then,” Jaskier had said, and Geralt had actually laughed. 

And so when Jaskier, after retiring to his living quarters after dark, caught the briefest glimpse of its wrinkled, childlike face, he clung to that fragment of an image and the half-remembered sound of a diatribe as he spun down, down, down into this frantic dream, until he woke up on the shore.

He asked Geralt over breakfast the next morning what he knew of godlings. The answer was frighteningly real, stitched together somehow, he suspects, out of his subconscious. It sounded like Geralt, the way he spoke under his breath; it moved like him, self-conscious of the size and strength of him. 

He’d said it, then. “You’re not real.”

Geralt had looked at him over a pan of boiling oats. 

“Hmm,” he’d said. “You don’t seem to care.”

That night, Geralt pins him against the mattress and fucks him until his throat goes raw from moaning. His hands fit into the same places on his hips they always did; his teeth sink into scars he left five years ago. 

  
  


It takes him too long to notice there is no lute here. No instruments of any kind. When he tries to sing, he finds the words leave him as easily as they came; like water pouring over a stone. 

He reaches for a space within him that would be bothered by this. He comes up empty. 

“You don’t go on contracts,” he tells Geralt, while the witcher mouths his way along Jaskier’s collarbones one morning. “I don’t play music. The money comes from nowhere. The food is always in abundance. It never rains--have you noticed that? Not once, not ever.”

Geralt looks at him with large, patient eyes. 

“I’m just saying,” Jaskier sighs, “you’re doing an awful job of trying to deceive me.”

Geralt chuckles. The sound vibrates down his chest, reverberates against Jaskier’s body. “Little bard,” he says. “I don’t think they’re bothering to deceive you.”

  
  


And they live like this for--hells. Weeks? Months? Does it matter, when he knows his body is seizing fitfully in a rented room that no-one has the keys for? Does it matter, when sometimes the sun will rise and set all at once, a blur of color that swallows the two of them whole? Does it matter, when Geralt is here?

Geralt is not in Vizima.

Geralt is dead for all he knows.

Geralt is beside him, their mouths coated with salt. 

  
  


He is dimly aware that he is dying. 

A body can only last in stasis so long, even a magical one. He recalls lectures on the subject. Warnings that Geralt gave him what feels like a lifetime ago. How to call for help when the place he is trapped is his own mind. 

He can’t remember any of them, now. He thinks he probably wanted to forget. 

Sometimes when he sits at breakfast with Geralt, plying him with jokes and barbs until the man cracks half a reluctant smile or exhales with a shake of the head, he can feel hunger pangs creep through his stomach even as he eats. 

“Do you think you’ll notice?” he asks Geralt. The man is on his knees. 

“Notice,” Geralt repeats. His fingers pry at Jaskier’s trousers. 

Jaskier exhales. He looks away. “When I’m gone.”

Geralt takes him in his mouth. Jaskier steadies himself against thick, muscled shoulders, and closes his eyes. 

In the song, this will be where he awakens. This will be where he realizes, in a desperate fit of lucidity, that the world he lives in is a farce, that this Geralt will never be  _ his _ Geralt, that to live in a painful truth is better than to die in a beautiful lie. 

This is not the song. 

The sea spray tastes like ash. 

The horizon is unfocused, his eyes slipping over it whenever he looks.

Geralt only grows warmer in bed next to him. 

“Tell me a story,” Jaskier whispers, his eyes leaden and heavy.

But he’s heard them all before. 

When he wakes, he is in a temple, swaddled in soft linens. 

They tell him he was found held captive by a godling. They say a witcher brought him in--no, not white hair, but these big scars across his face, real ugly-like. They say he left afterwards, straightaway. 

_ Must have been an awful nightmare, _ they say. 

He closes his eyes and sleeps. 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me places @besselfcn


End file.
